Category Archives: Case Studies

As a provider of managed IT services to a large number of businesses, often supporting mission-critical IT systems and applications, telephone support is an essential part of their toolkit, responding as needed and in real-time to their customers’ needs. Telephone support is subject to peaks and troughs and although these were handled well with no noticeable degradation in service for the majority of calls, on occasion, some support issues were leading to extended call times and this meant that calls started to queue for longer than were considered acceptable. eNerds needed a way to address and react to these situations, and to hopefully predict when these issue were about to occur and be able to proactively change call flows and bring in extra call handlers.

Identifying a Solution

Mitel MiVoice was the existing central communications platform for the company and was handling large call volumes as a result of significant expansion in business levels. The one piece that was missing was an effective contact centre solution. Essential Data + Voice (EDV) were already the supplier and maintainer of the eNerds communications solution and so a meeting was arranged to discuss these issues and possible resolutions. EDV, as a specialist integrator of comms technology were able to suggest a unique solution to the issue that would be a truly collaborative piece of work.

Kennards Hire is a leader in the equipment hire and rental industry, with a reputation for
delivering premium quality products and unparalleled customer service. Founded in 1948, the
family-owned company has 150 sites throughout Australia and New Zealand that provide
equipment rental solutions. Equipment ranges from small hand held tools to large specialist
products suited to commercial construction and mining sites. With the goal of being the best hire
company, but not necessarily the biggest, Kennards relentlessly pursues operational excellence
and strives to deliver outstanding customer service.
These high standards of quality and excellence extended to the company’s telephony strategy.
Kennards had previously adopted the FortiGate 60C solution to address a historical issue of the
lack of WAN redundancy and brought in standard Unified Threat Management capabilities,
including anti-virus and application control.

The Challenge

Kennards’ telephony system is the lifeblood of the company. Most customer enquiries are received by
phone into each branch. Kennards used a PABX with at least two ISDN2 on-ramps at each site. This
system was inefficient as it did not allow for global changes easily. Recurring maintenance and upgrade
costs related to the PABX system were high. For example, if a branch wanted to add a new functionality
such as an auto-attendant, additional hardware and installation was often required, increasing the costs
and leading to a deconstructed and inconsistent system across the organization.

Introducing a new branch or relocating an existing one in the network was a very complex and involved
process. Kennards would need to bring in Telstra and the owners of the telephony equipment,
and get the heavy involvement of their own IT team, driving up costs to the company.

The final and probably most important challenge was the slow redundancy failover process when ISDN
lines go down. It typically takes two to three hours to transfer calls and a further few hours to resolve the
issue, causing major loss of customer contact and valuable business opportunities.

“We were working with an inconsistent telephone system that was growing in its complexity and
maintenance costs and we found ourselves taking a reactive approach instead of an unattainable
proactive one,” said Mitch Hirsch, network engineer at Kennards Hire.

Tony Hilliger knows his competitors are just a phone call away. Mr Hilliger is the Financial controller at Col Crawford Motors, one of Australia’s largest motor dealerships.Founded in 1967, the company sells and services vehicles from 11 manufacturers.

The dealership is based in the Sydney suburb of Brookvale, with two further showrooms located in the Northern Beaches area and employees 230 people.

Mr Hilliger explained, “Col Crawford Motors represents 11 different vehicle franchises across our three sites. We are constantly adjusting our showroom environments, including moving desks and employees. Our old phone system required expensive cabling changes to move employees, and forced us to have cabling contractors on-site every month. It was a rigid system that made our lives difficult, and we were burning money whenever someone changed desks.”

To eliminate the need for expensive IT specialists to carry out routine tasks, Col Crawford decided to upgrade to an IP based communications solution. After investigating several successful IP based projects, the management team shortlisted four vendors. At the end of a thorough RFP evaluation process, Col Crawford decided to partner with Mitel and Essential Data & Voice for the project.

Mitel®, a leading provider of unified communications, has announced that Sydney-based Gizmo, a provider of in-home and phone-based technical support for a wide range of computer-related technologies, has successfully migrated to a fully fault tolerant Mitel unified communications solution to support the company’s rapid growth and improve the efficiency of their 10 Australian offices and large field services workforce.

Troy Cox, chief technology officer for Gizmo commented, “Gizmo’s goal is to help ordinary Australians, by sorting out the computer problems they run into at home. We are a young company that is growing fast, and need a flexible solution that helps our business grow.”

The core of Gizmo’s business is a contact centre located in its Sydney office. Operating seven days a week with 30 full-time employees, the contact centre handles all incoming customer requests, and provides comprehensive telephone-based support services to Gizmo’s clients.

When the New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) implemented a converged communications solution it quickly discovered it was a powerful enabler of much more than just voice calls.

“The bottom line for NSWIS was that we needed a network that was accessible from any location, and had sufficient bandwidth and redundancy to carry multiple DVD-quality video streams simultaneously without impacting voice quality,” according to NSWIS IT Manager Greg Baxter.

NSWIS was created 11 years ago by the New South Wales Government. It is the State’s elite sporting centre of excellence that strives to improve NSW’s representation in national teams and assists athletes to perform at world standard. It currently trains more than 700 athletes who compete in Olympic and Commonwealth Games as well as other sports such as cricket and golf.

Working with Telstra and its partner, Essential Data and Voice, NSWIS kicked off a converged communications project in an effort to allow its highly mobile staff to use their laptops to access email, voice mail and
multi-media.

Koorong is a Sydney based retail company, offering more than 100,000 Christian products, including books, bibles, music, videos, giftware and software.
Products are sold via Koorong retail outlets located across Australia, as well as via mail-order catalogue and online sales.

Communications Platforms, and a distributed 6100 Contact Centre Solution. With approximately 400 staff Australia wide, a distributed contact centre is a key part of Koorong’s business, supporting their sophisticated combined retail, mail order catalogue, and online sales operation.

Robert Bootes, IT Manager for Koorong said, “Our distributed Mitel Contact Centre Solution handles more than 1,000 inbound sales and service inquiries every day, servicing several time zones across a 13 hour work day.”

“Mitel’s solution has given us enormous flexibility in how we allocate our inbound phone inquiries to staff. Staff can now be rostered efficiently across time zones, with calls automatically sent to the best person – regardless of their location. We can now offer much more flexible work conditions to staff, better handle call volume surges, and our productivity has received a major boost.”